The Porto AFM Workshop 2017 has been announced. This is our fifth course!

The course will run from the 10th to 13th April. This is a training workshop, aimed at any researcher or scientist, who wants to learn about AFM, or increase their knowledge of the technique. Following the successful courses that have run since 2011, the course will includes several hours hands-on training in acquiring images with the atomic force microscope as well as AFM data processing.

Please click the image below to download the flyer with more details.

UPDATES:

More details of the course will be announced soon, meanwhile, as usual, pre-registration can be made by emailing me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Places on the course are very limited, so interested students should make enquiries or register as soon as possible.

There will be some guest scientists, talking about advanced applications in different areas. More details will be announced soon

The Porto AFM Workshop 2017 has been announced. This is our fifth course!

The course will run from the 10th to 13th April. This is a training workshop, aimed at any researcher or scientist, who wants to learn about AFM, or increase their knowledge of the technique. Following the successful courses that have run since 2011, the course will includes several hours hands-on training in acquiring images with the atomic force microscope as well as AFM data processing.

Please click the image below to download the flyer with more details.

UPDATES:

More details of the course will be announced soon, meanwhile, as usual, pre-registration can be made by emailing me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Places on the course are very limited, so interested students should make enquiries or register as soon as possible.

There will be some guest scientists, talking about advanced applications in different areas. More details will be announced soon

I am currently writing a chapter for a new book about AFM. The chapter will address AFM issues and artifact. If you have an image that illustrates well an AFM artifact or imaging problem, send it to me, and I might include it in the book!

I will ensure all images are properly credited to their submitters.

Meanwhile if you have an image with a problem, and you cannot identify it, you can also sen that in, and I'll see if I can diagnose the problem.

All images can be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is an ideal technique to characterise topography, as well as many other properties, of polymer films and artifacts. AFM has several advantages over electron microscopy in this regards. For instance, most polymers are insulators, and would therefore need to be coated for SEM observation, potentially changing their texture. AFM also does not need a thin sample, as TEM does.

There are many different experiments and modes appropriate for polymer samples. For good reviews see the bibliography at the end of the this article, or the longer article in my book. This article discusses two common types of measurements of polymer samples by AFM.

Phase imaging

Modes such as phase imaging are very useful for polymer composites, and copolymers since they consist of mixed materials, and the distribution of the phases is usually critical for their properties.

As described in section 3.2.3.2 of the book, phase imaging is sensitive to viscoelastic properties of the sample and to tip-sample adhesion. This means that many materials can be differentiated by phase imaging Because of its ability to distinguish many materials, phase imaging has been applied to an enormous number of samples, just some examples include differentiation of semiconductor films, nanoparticle characterisation and counting, observation of spherulites in polymer crystallisation, polymer blend and composite composition, protein adsorption to biomaterials, self assembled monolayers, and many more systems.

Phase imaging is particularly useful for distinguishing features in polymer films which do not exhibit great height contrast. For example, in the image below.

Topography (left) and phase (right) images of the same area of a polymer blend. While the topography image shows the presence of different regions in the blend, only in the phase image are they clearly distinguished.

Many people have asked me for a copy of this simple figure, showing how the AFM works. It's available for download below as a high quality .ppt file.

Please note the image is copyright 2010 Peter Eaton, and permission is given only for academic and educational use, excluding publishing. Please contact me if you want to use any other images on this website.